


Winterfell's Daughter

by searching4neverland



Series: Tokens of Life [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, mythology AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 12:19:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7463001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searching4neverland/pseuds/searching4neverland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They never speak her true name. 'The northern girl’ they call her… ‘Winterfell’s daughter’.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winterfell's Daughter

_Inspired by **[this](http://admdrivers.tumblr.com/post/133424938009)** magnificent edit_

* * *

> “ _For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror_  
>  which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,  
> because it serenely disdains to destroy us.  
> Every angel is terrible.”
> 
> — Rainer Maria Rilke, _Duino Elegies_

They never speak her true name. ‘The northern girl’ they call her… ‘Winterfell’s daughter’.

Before she became the Keeper of Winter, Sansa Stark was Sansa _Tully_ , daughter of Catelyn Tully and Eddard of Winterfell, first child of the Trident and heir of the Riverlands. A soft and smiling thing, who all believed was born from the very heart of Spring itself.

But she – as many others - lived through civil war, ruin and destruction. And they left a mark.

This child of Spring and maid of Summer, was a prisoner a long time. Barred in the halls of Storm’s End when the Rebellion started and then spirited away on the stony shores of the Rock once it turned, she spent the better part of her youth a captive of enemies.

She learned many things in her captivity, they say. Among them, the bitter taste of life and that the south was not, after all, as she had imagined it. No flower beds for the warm daughter of the Trident and Winterfell. Only sharp-clawed lions and fire-breathing dragons prowling about her. She learned that roses had biting thorns and that lies, though without honor, were the only thing that would keep her alive, so she had to tell them well. She was the friendless daughter of traitors with a lost sister to mourn while her family waged war.

A war that started when the heir of Winter and Keeper of its power, Lyanna Stark, stole away from the world with the Prince of Dragonstone, igniting furies none could have predicted. After all, who could predict madness? Rheagar Targaryen’s father, the Mad King Consort Arys, burned Lyanna Stark’s father, killed her eldest brother and released the Old Titans against the northern gods and lands.

Their savageries remain unmentionable to this day.

But for all their might, the titans did not stand unmet or unchallenged. The Keeper of Winter, their lady and most powerful warrior, may be lost, but the North turned to the last remaining Starks. The Quiet Wolf and his son the Young Wolf fought hard, them and the rest of their northern lords – they protected their own.

And for every battle they won, its cost was revisited upon the daughter that the south held prisoner.

It surprised them all, the resilience of one they had thought so frail. The Light of the West most of all, seemed the most slighted by such display. Words are wind, all know this, but if words were to be believed, the golden son of the most beautiful woman in creation was said to have been monstrous. It can only be imagined what punishments he chose for the daughter of those who fought against his family and their liege lords, the Dragons. Little of what befell Sansa Stark during her captivity is known. The accounts of her Lannister keepers are not to believed, and none have the courage or indelicacy to ask the lady herself. As for those who helped hold her captive in her misery… few of them survive. Those who do, do not dare to speak of it.

For you see… it was Sansa Stark, the soft lady born to be heiress of the green Tully meadows and the wide fertile lands along the Trident, who Winter chose as its keeper.

It happened like this: farther south than  any other Stark had ever been, Lyanna Stark died in her brothers arms, after having given birth to her only son, he who would later become the most precious gift she had ever give to the living world. When last breath left her body, the twinkling crystal caves shattered far in the north, and wolves howled for days and days in the mountains, raising a cry like no other… The Wall of Souls creaked from its foundations, the wails of the dead rising up against it like an immeasurable tide… and between Lyanna Starks least heartbeat and the silence that followed it, the powers of the old gods left her body too and chose another keeper – and this keeper was Sansa Stark, the caged bird of Casterly Rock.

The ‘why’ of such a choice remains a mystery. None know how the gifts of Winter transfer, not even the bearers themselves. Northerners are not born with their power as the southern deities are. They grow into it, discover it slowly. Some say it’s the power that chooses its bearer and that the northern gods are but vessels to much older forces. The spirits of creation itself, legends says, are at work there.

Nobody thought it would be possible, for Winter to chose its abode within such a creature as the Red Bird, who seemed to have been fashioned for love and spring. But they thought wrong. They only saw the beauty and the sweetness, and missed the iron underneath.

But the Old Gods, though terrifying and cruel, are wise in their ways. And Fate had written a different song for Sansa Stark, daughter of a Tully: she was no bird at all, nor a nymph of the blue waters of the Trident. But a Wolf of the North and as such, when her aunt died, she breathed Winter into her lungs. the power of it burrowed deep into her bones and her being, ironing her spine… and she _ascended_.

Those that survived the riptide of such a violent event, say it was a magnificent thing to behold. Oh, terrible too, to be sure – she almost razed the top of Casterly Rock to dirt, and all those within to nothing. But magnificent all the same.

However, her ascension into a true goddess was as brutal for her as it was for those around her.

From her heart spread a snowstorm that lasted years; froze over half the western and southern shores before she could ever learn how to control it. Many lives were lost, and those closest to the lady will tell of how she will never forgive herself such recklessness. But she could not have stopped herself, for she had not _been_ herself. Not truly.

Some say she walked out of the Rock barefooted and in a daze, drugged on her newfound power. Wherever she walked, clouds would gather thick and block the sun. Darkness fell upon the lands, snowdrifts reaching as far south as Dorne… and amidst that freezing wasteland and the dark wolf’s hour, _flowers_ , red as blood and more poisonous than manticore’s venom, bloomed in her passing.

Even now, eons later, nothing grows in the lands she walked back then, immediately after her captivity.

The stories say that the Dragons used her and the newborn Jon Snow – her cousin and Lyanna’s only heir - to make peace with Ned Stark and the whole of the North, but the truth is different. The North had its goddess back, and she was white as death and terrible, her power stronger than the foundations of the earth. Much too strong to risk antagonizing for no reason, after Rheagar Targaryen returned to the Red Keep and his mother the Queen Regnant too. Queen Rhaella had given birth to a daughter and heir, finally, and upon her return she burned her mad husband on the throne he had occupied undeservedly and put an end to his folly. She helped the northerners cast the Titans into the deep prisons of the Lands of Ever Winter beyond the Wall, and she made peace.

There were terms to this peace, and a frail truce between the wolves and the Dragons. The Quiet Wolf left his nephew with his father, giving in to Rheagar’s plea. He was to be raised among Drongons until the boy came of age. Sansa Stark was reunited with her family. Lannisters will forever hold that this too was part of the peace… but all know it happened so because none dared keep the Lady of Winterfell at their door, once the Old Gods had turned her blue eyes into glass.

Winter is a power that can unmake and remake the world, as great as the Dragon’s fire… but in the hands of Sansa Stark it was something more than that. For though the powers of Winter had always been great, they found a terrible vessel in the Stark girl. A heart big enough to love all the living beat within that breast, it was true… but a rage strong enough drag them all by their skins to the doors of the Wall do all Souls lived inside her as well. Whether by her will or not, she killed all life that she befell on, so great were her powers and so inexperience was she at controlling them.

The Accursed One, The Unseen One, they called her thereafter, south of the Neck. Spawn of evil and the Stranger. The Nameless goddess, for they all learned to dread her too much to call her name, for fear of attracting Death itself. And all too readily they forgot, it was the South that fashioned her that way: after their own hearts.

And still… still she holds court in Winterfell and the Wall, and the north fairs well under her guidance. Never has there been a more just ruler in the Underworld.

But only the shadows and the dearly departed know that – and they cannot speak to any but each other.


End file.
